Dismissing talk of Israeli strike on Iran as ‘a transparent bluff,’ pro-Israel think-tanker warns of nuclear war in South Asia

In an intriguing op-ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post that preemptively critiques the likely foreign policy failures of the next U.S. administration, a senior employee of an influential pro-Israel think tank charges Washington with spending the next four years “obsessing about a possible Israeli strike on Iran.” Daniel Byman, the research director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, dismisses Tel Aviv’s endless warnings of being forced to take imminent unilateral military action to stop Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program as “a transparent bluff.”

Byman’s dismissal of talk of war with Iran doesn’t mean that we can all breathe a sigh of collective relief, however. As a result of its misguided obsession with the Middle East, the Saban research director predicts that the United States will fail to prevent an escalation toward nuclear war in South Asia between India and Pakistan.

The Saban Center was established in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million from the Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban to the Brookings Institution. Having once admitted to the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,” Saban told an Israeli conference in 2010 that establishing think tanks was one of his “three ways to be influential in American politics” — along with making donations to political parties and controlling media outlets — so that he could “protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.”

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.